Alison Wylie

Glymour’s boostrapping account of confirmation is meant to show how it is that evidence can bear on a theory in a discriminating, noncircular way even when that theory is used to establish the inferential link between evidence and a test hypothesis. Evidence confirms a theory on his account if, “using the theory, we can deduce from the evidence an instance of the hypothesis i.e., an hypothesis comprising or instantiating the test theory, and the deduction is such that it does not guarantee that we would have gotten an instance of the hypothesis regardless of what the evidence might have been.” (1980, p. 127). Glymour goes on to argue that this strategy of inference should appear most explicitly in the developing and “un-natural” (social) sciences where novel theories are being formulated or applied to new domains (1980, p. 172).

A century ago historian of science George Sarton argued that “science is our greatest treasure, but it needs to be humanized or it will do more harm than good”. The systematic cultivation of an “historical spirit,” a philosophical appreciation of the dynamic nature of scientific inquiry, and a recognition that science is irreducibly a “collective enterprise” was, on Sarton’s account, crucial to the humanizing mission he advocated. These elements of Sarton’s program are more relevant than ever as philosophers of science articulate research programs that take seriously the contextual factors, situated interests, and historical contingencies that shape the sciences we study. I trace the trajectory of a long-term philosophical engagement with archaeology that illustrates a succession of ways in which social, cultural, and political values configure inquiry, culminating in a program of collaborative research that raises the question of what role philosophers can usefully play when the challenges of humanizing scientific practice have centrally to do with navigating entrenched asymmetries of power.

This paper examines the outcomes of Preserving the Past Together, a workshop series designed to build the capacity of local heritage managers to engage in collaborative and community-based approaches to archaeology and historic preservation. Over the past two decades practitioners of these approaches have demonstrated the interpretive, methodological, and ethical value of integrating Indigenous perspectives and methods into the process and practice of heritage management and archaeology. Despite these benefits, few professional resources exist to support the development of collaborative relationships between local heritage managers and Tribal nations. Filling this need, Preserving the Past Together’s interactive workshops and keynote lectures involved participants in a discussion of the central themes in collaborative and Indigenous approaches to archaeology today, highlighting the local challenges and opportunities that exist for archaeologists, heritage managers, and Tribal nations to work together to care for the past. This paper presents an overview of the event series’ goals, the strategies it used to foster collaboration among the diverse stakeholders of the Salish Sea, and the next steps the project’s co-directors are taking to further support communication and collaboration between stewards and stakeholders in the Pacific Northwest.

We explore our role as researchers and witnesses in the context of an emerging partnership with the Penelakut Tribe, the aim of which is to locate the unmarked graves of children who died while attending the notorious Kuper Island Indian Residential School on their territory (southwest British Columbia). This relationship is in the process of taking shape, so we focus on understanding conditions for developing trust, and the interactional expertise necessary to work well together, with a good heart. We suggest that, in some respects, this may be usefully understood as a practice of witnessing on several dimensions.

When radiocarbon dating techniques were applied to archaeological material in the 1950s they were hailed as a revolution. At last archaeologists could construct absolute chronologies anchored in temporal data backed by immutable laws of physics. This would make it possible to mobilize archaeological data across regions and time-periods on a global scale, rendering obsolete the local and relative chronologies on which archaeologists had long relied. As profound as the impact of 14C dating has been, it has had a long and tortuous history now described as proceeding through three revolutions, each of which addresses distinct challenges of capturing, processing and packaging radiogenic data for use in resolving chronological puzzles with which archaeologists has long wrestled. In practice, mobilizing radiogenic data for archaeological use is a hard-won achievement; it involves multiple transformations that, at each step of the way, depend upon a diverse array of technical expertise and background knowledge. I focus on strategies of triangulation and traceability that establish the integrity of these data and their relevance as anchors for evidential reasoning in archaeology.

I am on record as a fan of Rock, Bone, and Ruin, and I was pleased to discover that, in our paired cover blurbs, Martin Rudwick and I make essentially the same point: the great virtue of Rock, Bone, and Ruin is that Adrian Currie combines what you might describe as a jeweler’s-eye view, in his attention to the messy details of research practice in the historical sciences, with a cartographer’s breadth of vision that, as Rudwick puts it, leads him to “explore the surprising commonalities that underlie these superficially diverse sciences.” Rather than appraising the epistemic prospects of the historical sciences against an abstract, trans-contextual template, Currie builds this breadth from close analysis of the strategies by which epistemically “unlucky” historical scientists parlay their limited evidential resources into a robust understanding of temporally remote geological events, evolutionary processes and cultural dynamics. As a demonstration of how productive such a turn to practice can be, Currie’s approach has meta-philosophical implications to which I return at the end, but first I offer a selective review of his appraisal of the limitations of trace-centric accounts.

Taking seriously the social dimensions of knowledge puts pressure on the assumption that epistemic agents can usefully be thought of as autonomous, interchangeable individuals, capable, insofar as they are rational and objective, of transcending the specificities of personal history, experience, and context. If this idealization is abandoned as the point of departure for epistemic inquiry, then differences among situated knowers come sharply into focus. These include differences in cognitive capacity, experience, and expertise; in access to information and the heuristics that make it intelligible; and in motivating interests and orienting standpoint. Dissent takes on rather different significance, as a potentially productive feature of epistemic life rather than evidence of a failure of aperspectivality or an indication of error. The central questions are, then, what forms of diversity are epistemically consequential, and how can they best be deployed to ensure that the beliefs we warrant as knowledge are as well grounded and truth-tracking as possible.

*PSA 2016, symposium on “Data in Time: Epistemology of Historical Data” organized by Sabina Leonelli, 5 November 2016* *See published version: "Radiocarbon Dating in Archaeology: Triangulation and Traceability" in Data Journeys in the Sciences (2020) - link below* Archaeologists put a premium on pressing “legacy data” into service, given the notoriously selective and destructive nature of their practices of data capture. Legacy data consist of material and records that been assembled over decades, sometimes centuries, often by means and for purposes long since discredited or superseded. The primary strategies by which archaeologists put the data to work for new purposes are, I argue, secondary retrieval, recontextualization, and experimental modelling. I focus here on a particularly telling and complex example of secondary retrieval: the extraction of new data from old by means of radiocarbon dating. This is by no means a straightforward process of retrieving physical samples from legacy data to which 14C techniques can be applied that can, on their own, decisively settle chronological questions. When Libby’s post-war radiocarbon revolution got under way, it was expected to establish an absolute chronology that would render obsolete the local and relative chronologies on which archaeologists had long relied. Transformative though it has been, bringing these tools of physical dating to bear on archaeological problems has been a long, tortuous process, now described as proceeding through two subsequent radiocarbon revolutions. The second was an extended process of calibration by which 14C chronologies were corrected and refined, often against the very lines of evidence they were meant to displace. The most recent, a “pragmatic Bayesian” approach to archaeological dating, is motivated by concern that, no matter how much it is refined, radiocarbon dating cannot on its own resolve the chronological problems that archaeologists address; the challenge, its advocates argue, is to ‘fully integrate archaeological information with 14C dating in order to address archaeologically relevant timescales and episodes’. This is a genre of “robustness” reasoning that illustrates its epistemic risks as well as its appeal. As recent philosophical debate makes clear, it depends on appeals to the convergence of independent lines of evidence that may have more rhetorical than epistemic force and that may be spurious. Drawing on this philosophical literature I identify a set of conditions that must be met if these risks are to be avoided, all of which are an explicit focus of debate in cases of contestation about and reconciliation of chronologies based on legacy data.

In the past three decades scholars in virtually every humanistic and social scientific research discipline, and in some natural sciences, have drawn attention to quite striking instances of gender bias in the modes of practice and theorizing typical of traditional fields of research. They generally begin by identifying explicit androcentric biases in definitions of the subject domains appropriate to specific scientific fields. Their primary targets, in this connection, have been research that leaves women out altogether, research that ignores women’s contributions or victimization, and research that conceptualizes its subject, male or female, human or non-human, in explicitly gender biased terms.

Archaeological data are shadowy in a number of senses. Not only are they notoriously fragmentary but the conceptual and technical scaffolding on which archaeologists rely to constitute these data as evidence can be as constraining as it is enabling. A recurrent theme in internal archaeological debate is that reliance on sedimented layers of interpretative scaffolding carries the risk that “preunderstandings” configure what archaeologists recognize and record as primary data, and how they interpret it as evidence. The selective and destructive nature of data capture in archeology further suggests that there may be little scope for putting “legacy” data to work in new ways. And yet archaeologists have been strikingly successful in mining old datasets for new insights. I situate these concerns in the broader context of debate about the epistemic standing of the historical sciences, and then consider three strategies by which archaeologists address the challenges posed by legacy data. The first two – secondary retrieval and recontextualization – are a matter of reconfiguring the scaffolding that underpins evidential reasoning. The third turns on redeploying old data in the context of computational models that support the experimental simulation of the cultural systems and contexts under study.

I’m often asked why, as a philosopher of science, I study archaeology. Philosophy is so abstract and intellectual, and archaeology is such an earth-bound, data-driven enterprise, what could the connection possibly be? This puzzlement takes a number of different forms. In one memorable exchange in the late 1970s when I was visiting Oxford as a graduate student an elderly don, having inquired politely about my research interests, tartly observed that archaeology isn’t a science, so I couldn’t possibly be writing a dissertation in philosophy of science on archaeology. At job interviews a few years later a standard opening gambit was to ask: “so what’s philosophical about the work you do on archaeology” or, more querulously, “what could possibly be of philosophical interest in archaeology”? And from archaeologists, weary of the “theory wars” that raged through 1980s and 1990s, the standard question was, “What’s the point?! Better to step away from the wrangling about philosophical ‘isms’ and get on with the empirical work that needs doing.”

The contributions to Testing Scientific Theories are unified by an interest in responding to criticisms directed by Glymour against existing models of confirmation–-chiefly H-D and Bayesian schemas–-and in assessing and correcting the “bootstrap“ model of confirmation that he proposed as an alternative in Theory and Evidence. As such, they provide a representative sample of objections to Glymour's model and of the wide range of new initiatives in thinking about scientific confirmation that it has influenced. The effect is a sense of engagement and focus, and of significant advance at least in articulation of the problems that require solution; as Earman observes, “it is … heartening to report that the various opposing camps learned from each other”. In what follows I am concerned to assess what has been learned both critically, about Glymour's model, and constructively about the resources of the alternatives he challenges. My thesis is that while the theories emerging in this debate do deal with a wider range of scientific practice than before, their remaining limitations raise important questions about the ambitions and criteria of adequacy that have traditionally governed philosophical inquiry in this area.

Recent feminist analyses of power constitute a resource for theorizing power that archaeologists cannot afford to ignore given the importance of ‘post‐processual’ arguments that social relations, in which power is a central dimension, are as constitutive of system level dynamics as is the environment in which cultural systems are situated. I argue that they are important on two fronts: they articulate a dynamic, situational conception of power that resists reification, and they suggest a strategy for circumventing the polarized debates over objectivism: relativism which arise when a concern with power turns reflexive.

Alison Wylie is one of the few full-time academic philosophers of the social and historical sciences on the planet today. And fortunately for us, she happens to specialise in archaeology! After emerging onto the archaeological theory scene in the mid-1980s with her work on analogy, she has continued to work on philosophical questions raised by archaeological practice. In particular, she explores the status of evidence and ideals of objectivity in contemporary archaeology: how do we think we know about the past? Her other key interests include feminist initiatives in Anglo-American archaeology, and ethical conflicts in current archaeological practice. Kathryn Denning recently asked about her adventures in archaeology and academia and her thoughts on archaeology’s past, present, and future.

Standpoint theory is an explicitly political as well as social epistemology. Its central insight is that epistemic advantage may accrue to those who are oppressed by structures of domination and discounted as knowers. Feminist standpoint theorists hold that gender is one dimension of social differentiation that can make such a difference. In response to two longstanding objections I argue that epistemically consequential standpoints need not be conceptualized in essentialist terms, and that they do not confer automatic or comprehensive epistemic privilege on those who occupy them. Standpoint theory is best construed as conceptual framework for investigating the ways in which socially situated experience and interests make a contingent difference to what we know (well), and to the resources we have for determining which knowledge claims we can trust. I illustrate the advantages of this account in terms of two examples drawn from archaeological sources.